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Sunday, December 4, 2016

Data quality, data parentage

My early career was in technical intelligence, so I was struck by this phrase applicable not only to that domain, but to my present domain -- project management:

"The value of [information] depends on it's breeding. .. Until you understand the pedigree of the information you can not evaluate a report. We are not democratic. We close the door on intelligence without parentage."

John LeCarre

Some years ago, Chapter 11 of the PMBOK was rewritten to include "data quality" as an element of risk understanding and analysis. Certainly, some of the motivation for that rewrite was the idea of information parentage -- information qualities.

The idea here is not that data has meet a certain quality standard -- though perhaps in your project it should -- but that you as project manager have an obligation to ascertain the data qualities. In other words, accepting data in a fog is bound to be troublesome.

If some attributes are unknown, or unknowable, at least you should do the investigation to understand whether or not the door should be closed. After all: there's no obligation to be democratic about data. Autocrats accepted!